La Plaza de Santa Ana y los corrales de Madrid

Hello fellow Jaspers abroad and back home!

I have had the most amazing week ever.

On Sunday (Jan. 10th), the girls and I went on a tour around the historic side of Madrid. Olivia already posted some of this pictures, so I am just gonna go ahead and post one more that I really liked.

This is El Palacio Real de Madrid. A truly magnificent building. I do not think the king and the queen were at home, so we did not stop to say "hi" to them. Too bad for them, I guess. (That's our tour guide, Annie, by the way!)

This past Sunday (Jan. 17th), our theater professor took us in a little tour around Plaza de Santa Ana to go and see the "corrales Madrileños". Even though the stages and boards where they staged the plays are not longer there, it was really interesting to see the Plaza, especially with all its statues.

This is the statue to Calderon de la Barca and it is in La Plaza de Santa Ana. He is best known for his play La vida es sueño. He inspired a lot of the work of Miguel de Unamuno, so by default, and because I love Unamuno's work, I love everything he did, too. 

This is the statue of my favorite poet in the world: Federico Garcia Lorca. It is also located in La Plaza de Santa Ana. Just two more words to say about this is: Romancero gitano -- a must read in life.

This building is El Teatro Español. It is right next to La Plaza de Santa Ana, and something interesting is that it used to be a "corral". 

For those who do not know what a "corral" means: well, it was just basically the stage where some of Spanish Golden Age plays would be staged. It was called that because this "corrales" were in the middle of the back of the houses. The one above is the one by Calle Principe, and there was another one by Calle Cruz. The one by Calle Principe was remodeled into El Teatro Español, and as you can see there are scribed names of popular play writers such as Calderon de la Barca, Federico Garcia Lorca, and of course, Lope de Vega. 

This post is really small because next time I want to talk about the differences between college life in the US and in Spain. I've learned some pretty neat stuff about this in my culture class and I want to share it with all of you because I feel that is also a big part of the whole experience. So far, I have not had another culture shock (I'm looking at my water right now), but I'll keep you posted on that. Well, I kind of did encounter another shock: plastic bags. They hate them here, and it is understandable, they create massive amounts of pollution. If anything, I like the fact that they reuse them again and again, and go as far as charge you for each one so you stop using them. It's only 0.05 centimos, but still, it adds up once in a while. 

Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks for reading!

-Paulina Ochoa - F.